He’s felt them circling, watching, buzzing like flies against the property lines. He’s seen the vehicles idling at the gates and ripped out the sensors and wires they leave behind. He’s found the elegant business cards wedged in the front gates and received the bland corporate letters, and he’s burned them both.
Arthur has read enough records from the previous Wardens to know they aren’t the first outsiders to come calling. There have been explorers and journalists, cultists and spies, generations of Gravelys and their damn lawyers. All of them want the same thing: to exploit, to extract, to profit, to throw open doors that should remain closed. So they followed the stories and starlings to his front gates.
They’ve never gotten any farther. Part of the duty of the Warden is to ward the walls, to feed the land a few drops of blood, fresh and hot, so that it never forgets who is and isn’t a Starling.15 Elizabeth Baine will never set foot on his property, unless she is much cleverer than she seems.
Or, he supposes, simply patient. She would have to wait until Arthur has found a way past that final door, the one that has no key. Until he’s descended into the dark and done what none of the previous Wardens have ever managed. The gate would swing wide for her then, but it wouldn’t matter, because the House would be only a house, with nothing beneath it but worms and wisteria roots.
The starlings settle back into the branches. The car is gone.
A moment later, Arthur feels the gates open. He presses his forehead hard against the glass.
A figure emerges from the woods, a scrawny shape swallowed by the black square of his coat, her face white beneath the red blaze of her hair. The sight strikes him as entirely and dangerously correct, as if she should always be wearing his clothes, walking toward his House. It’s difficult to tell, but he thinks her face might be tilted up toward his; the possibility makes all his scars itch.
It’s not an itch, of course. It’s that tedious, boyish hunger, which he hasn’t indulged since he returned from school. Luke sent a few letters, but Arthur burned them unopened. Luke had always been too soft, too sweet; after an hour in Starling House he would have run screaming and never come back.
He watches Opal walk closer and thinks, inanely: She keeps coming back.
The House sighs around him. He raps his knuckles against the sill hard enough to sting, unsure which of them he’s trying to reprimand.
He tries to make himself as forbidding and unpleasant as possible when he opens the door, but Opal doesn’t notice. She looks up at him with her eyes gone odd and dark, her freckles stark against bloodless cheeks. She laughs at him. And then—
Arthur stares down at his shoes, spattered with stringy bile.
Opal wipes her mouth on her sleeve, swaying a little, and whispers, hoarsely, “Sorry.”
He gestures her wordlessly into the hall. She stumbles a little over the threshold and his hands give a traitorous twitch. “Bathroom?” His voice is indifferent. She nods, lips white.
Her footsteps are usually light and furtive, like those of an animal ready to bolt, but now she walks heavily, bones loose, shoes scuffing. Arthur’s arm hovers at her back, not quite touching her.
“Sorry man. I mean Arthur. I mean Mr. Starling. About your shoes I didn’t mean to.” Her sentences run in a strange, flat rhythm, as if someone shook the punctuation out of them. “I’ll clean it up just give me a sec.”
There’s an anxious note in her voice that makes his stomach twist with guilt. As if he cares about the state of the House, as if he hasn’t purposefully overfilled the tub when it annoyed him, watching the water drip through the ceiling with black delight.
In the bathroom he settles her on the closed lid of the toilet and hands her a cup of tap water. She drinks and he kneels awkwardly on the tile, close enough to catch the sugary, chemical scent on her clothes. The room is much smaller than he remembers it; he grinds an elbow surreptitiously into the wall. It takes no notice.
“Thanks. Sorry about the mess. I’ll take care of—”
He makes an embarrassed grimace. “Don’t worry about it.”
She nods sloppily, sloshing water. “Okay. Okay sure.” Her forehead is sheened with sweat, her throat flushed.
“May I take your coat? Here.” Arthur reaches up for the top button, but Opal jerks back so hard she rocks the porcelain tank behind her.
“No. It’s mine.” She frowns down at him, blinking as if she can’t quite focus on his features. Up close her eyes look wrong, her pupils swollen and glassy, her irises reduced to slim rings of silver.
“Are you—are you high?” Arthur is almost relieved; so few of his problems are mundane.
She blinks, then she laughs again. It echoes off the tile, hollow and brittle, and leaves her panting. “Oh, go to hell Arthur Starling.” She swallows hard. “Sorry sorry don’t fire me I’m just a little carsick or something because Hal is a shitty driver and I had to read all those headlines. Which is funny because most of the bad luck in this town never even makes it into the headlines. In third grade the ceiling collapsed like three feet from Jasper’s desk16 and the last time I went swimming I got my foot caught in an old trotline and nearly drowned and—” She’s forced to pause for air. “—and I never looked at any pictures of the accident before—it was an accident, Constable Mayhew can go fuck himself—” She pinches her own lips together, hard.
Acid guilt rises from Arthur’s stomach to his throat. There are no accidents in Eden.
Opal unpinches her lips. “I’m not feeling great. And I didn’t really want to spend the morning playing twenty questions about you and your creepy-ass house.”
The pipes whine in the walls and Opal pats the cast-iron lip of the bathtub in absent-minded apology. Arthur pretends not to notice.
He takes the cup from her hands and says, mildly, “Someone was asking about me?”
“Yeah. I was walking along and this corporate lady pulls up in a nice car with a cheap air freshener and tells me—”
“You were walking?”
Opal gives him another unsteady frown. “I just said that.”
“Why were you walking?” He doesn’t know where she and her brother live, but the nearest house is at least a mile away, and it was chilly this morning.
“Because,” she enunciates very clearly, as if Arthur is the one who is drugged, “I had to get to work.”
“Well why didn’t you—” He feels suddenly very stupid. “You don’t have a car.”
Opal curls her lip. “Anyway this lady gave me a ride and then she gave me money to spy on you and that’s why I’m late.”
Arthur’s fingers go numb. He thinks, distantly, that Elizabeth Baine must be cleverer than she seems.
He looks up at Opal, her hands gripping her own knees, her clothes reeking of something sick and sweet, her frown not quite covering the black memory of terror in her eyes.
He recalls in that moment the real reason his mother forbade him from getting a pet: once you open the door, you never know what else might come in. Or what might get out.
As a boy he’d thrown fits over her rules, beating his heels against the walls, half mad with loneliness, but now—shaking with rage on his bathroom floor beside a girl who is not as brave as she pretends, who lies and steals and walks in the cold without a coat to earn money that isn’t for her—he knows his mother was right.
He stands abruptly. The boundary walls will need walking, the wards tending. “I have to go.”
Opal flinches back from the sudden grate of his voice. On any other day she would hide her feelings behind an artificial smile, but now she gives him an honest glare. There’s reproach and betrayal in her face, as if she forgot for a few minutes to be afraid of him and resents the reminder. “I didn’t—” She tucks a coil of hair behind one ear. “I didn’t tell them anything. Promise.”